Abstract-Applications, deployed over a wide area network (WAN) which may connect across metropolitan, regional or national boundaries, suffer performance degradation owing to unavoidable natural characteristics of WANs such as high latency and high packet loss rate. WAN optimization, also known as WAN acceleration, aims to accelerate a broad range of applications and protocols over a WAN. In this paper, we provide a survey on the state of the art of WAN optimization or WAN acceleration techniques, and illustrate how these acceleration techniques can improve application performance, mitigate the impact of latency and loss, and minimize bandwidth consumption. We begin by reviewing the obstacles in efficiently delivering applications over a WAN. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive survey of the most recent content delivery acceleration techniques in WANs from the networking and optimization point of view. Finally, we discuss major WAN optimization techniques which have been incorporated in widely deployed WAN acceleration productsmultiple optimization techniques are leveraged by a single WAN accelerator to improve application performance in general.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.